James Gurney

This daily weblog by Dinotopia creator James Gurney is for illustrators, plein-air painters, sketchers, comic artists, animators, art students, and writers. You'll find practical studio tips, insights into the making of the Dinotopia books, and first-hand reports from art schools and museums.

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Friday, October 22, 2010

Artist Dragan Bibin has developed an interesting method to create reference maquettes using gesso-saturated cotton.

He begins with an armature made from aluminum wire and tin foil, wrapped in masking tape.
This framework is coated with acrylic gesso. Then bits of dry cotton are applied to the wet surface and shaped with a small brush, adding more acrylic gesso until the cotton is saturated enough to hold the desired shape.

All the shaping is done with a small brush. The forms are built by adding layers of patches of the saturated cotton. This method is actually very fast, because you don’t have to wait for the surface to dry to build upon it.

The resulting maquette is inexpensive, lightweight, airy, very tough, and durable, since the acrylic polymers are fairly elastic. Once it is fully dry, it can later be sanded and painted with acrylic paints.

Very cool.I wonder if it wouldn't be better to use something like latex, as Kevin said above, so that it would "trap" some light inside of the model once lit, then it might look more like real flesh, I suppose. But maybe it would take more time to dry, so...

Now that is a fantastic idea. I wish I'd known about this back when I was still in art classes, because we had lots of cotton balls and gesso lying around. A bit messy for me to attempt in my apartment!

Yeah -- I've done the latex and cotton method --but it ruins the paint brush (use disposable) Gesso would probably give you more detail (course you could make little texture molds out of plasticene clay, pour the latex in and then, once dry, attach the textured latex to the sculpture).

In light of the season, the latex/ cotton method is also good for mask making -- a kind of poor man's foam latex without all the casting.

there are now sub 5000K 3d printers on the market - probably cheap services will spring up too - that should add a whole new dimension to maquette making - though i do thing there is something about making things with one's hands that makes a deeper imprint on the brain